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Law School is a sham

Liquid Karma said:
I assume the money is pretty good eventually.

I get 6 weeks of PTO and I use almost all of it every year.
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What job do you have where you can just drop what you are doing and walk away for weeks at a time? I feel like in most jobs there is the vacation time you can technically take and then the vacation time you can take in reality without screwing up everything going on and make everyone hate you.
 
We don't keep track of vacation or billable hours, collections are all that matter and (assuming salary and overhead are met) they are just for determining the bonus. So I'll usually take a full week in the spring, a second full week towards the end of the summer, and various days here and there. Then if my collections are fine by about the end of November, I'll probably take Christmas week off and maybe a couple of more days in December. If my collections are mediocre and I want a bigger bonus, I'll work more in December (a lot of which is just telling people to pay up).
 
P4nthers11 said:
What job do you have where you can just drop what you are doing and walk away for weeks at a time? I feel like in most jobs there is the vacation time you can technically take and then the vacation time you can take in reality without screwing up everything going on and make everyone hate you.
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Project management for a large software company. As with any company there are constraints on when I can use the time, or how much I can use at once. Generally we try to make sure my boss and I never vacation at the same time.

The trade off is that I spend anywhere from 15-20 weeks a year on the road for work, so I do have to schedule around that.
 
2&2 Slider To Leyritz said:
We don't keep track of vacation or billable hours, collections are all that matter and (assuming salary and overhead are met) they are just for determining the bonus. So I'll usually take a full week in the spring, a second full week towards the end of the summer, and various days here and there. Then if my collections are fine by about the end of November, I'll probably take Christmas week off and maybe a couple of more days in December. If my collections are mediocre and I want a bigger bonus, I'll work more in December (a lot of which is just telling people to pay up).
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Collections?
 
HeavyPetter said:
Yes. Getting your clients to pay is a big part of running a business so that you can make money. And usually, the more money a client has, the longer it takes them to pay you.
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Got it. I'm used to it being called Accounts Receivable.
 
DeacinBama said:
I'm assuming that, for attorneys, a lawsuit is no big deal. As in, it's Tuesday so let's go down to the courthouse and file all of these suits. Understand that from the physician's standpoint, it's a giant fucking deal. It's personal, and it causes you to question your self-worth as someone pledged to help others. It will irrevocably alter the way that you practice medicine. Even getting named in a suit, even frivolously, has to be reported to every licensing board, to every credentialing committee, and on every job application for the rest of your life. Actually, forget about a patient-initiated tort, just the microscope that the hospital puts you under is extremely disruptive. In short, when I make a CYA decision at work that costs extra money, it's not because I'm worried about losing a suit. It's because I'm looking for 100% avoidance of ever getting named in association with a potentially compensable event.
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I can understand your mindset, when I was in private law practice I did a ton of CYA stuff too (like memos to the file, CYA letters to clients telling them not to do what they were about to do, etc.).

The difference is that in many cases neither I nor the law firm got paid for that activity. Sophisticated clients don't want to pay for me to cover my ass. At least in a firm like ours a lot of research time to "double check" that we were giving the right answer, or time spent writing memos to the file, gets written off and never billed. Therefore in the law the temptation to CYA everything is tempered by the knowledge that you're spending time that you won't get paid for, time=money, and there's an opportunity cost. Even more important, clients will fire lawyers who constantly CYA and choose ones who are more confident and efficient - in fact, I just fired a lawyer for this reason. Good lawyers learn to balance the urge to CYA against the opportunity cost. Lawyers who spin their wheels CYAing on every matter are not successful.

In medicine, as far as I can tell there is NO opportunity cost to CYA testing, and in fact, the CYAing is a huge profit center for the entities running the tests. Thus the medical culture strongly encourages the CYAing. I bet your mentors trained you to run all these tests, the hospital is happy to run the tests and collect the money, the patients have been taught over the years to expect a lot of tests - in short, unlike the law, everything is set up to maximize the testing, because the downside (huge costs to insurance companies/Medicare and ever-rising premiums) are completely removed from the people making the decisions to over-test.

While a doctor's subjective fear of a lawsuit (reasonable or unreasonable) plays a role, the fact is that all the financial incentives support over-testing and that absolutely plays a role. Pretending otherwise is just putting your head in the sand.
 
Marquee Moon said:
I know 3 lawyers who died in the last few months in their 60s before they could enjoy any retirement.
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Yep. Working like a beast so you can finally enjoy life in your 60s seems like a waste.
 
we listened to some presentation this week about how lawyers are 4x more likely to develop mental health disorders than those professionals outside the field of law

L O L
 
wake20 said:
we listened to some presentation this week about how lawyers are 4x more likely to develop mental health disorders than those professionals outside the field of law

L O L
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Yep. Alcoholism and drug abuse are rampant as well.

You have a bunch of people who are overwhelmingly Type A perfectionists and control freaks, and yet tons of the most important things affecting their career and lives are completely out of their control. Add onto that the huge oversupply of lawyers making it harder and harder to make a living, and the burden of student loan debt for most. Pretty toxic.
 
Marquee Moon said:
I know 3 lawyers who died in the last few months in their 60s before they could enjoy any retirement.
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I fully expect to die before retirement. In part because my cholesterol is so high that the doctor feels confident that I've got 20 years left. After that, pretty much a crap shoot. I would like to hit 60, however.
 
One of the better criminal defense attys in the A blew his brains out in the parking garage of the State Bar a few weeks ago. Good times.
 
Marquee Moon said:
and they didn't enjoy jack shit

food for worms
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Haha that's the thing, I've had MDs that work 80 hour weeks into their 50s for no other reason than the fact that they have nothing in life outside of work. They don't and can't enjoy anything.
 
My boss is 56. Both kids grown. He stays in the office until 8-9 every night, not because of deadlines. Im convinced that its either bc he doesnt want to go home to his wife, or really has nothing else to do.
 
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